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Japanese No. Lavender is not named in the Hebrew or Greek text of the Bible or in any standard English translation. The plant sometimes confused with it is nard, or spikenard, the costly perfume poured over Jesus at Bethany. Bible dictionaries identify that nard as Nardostachys jatamansi, a plant of the Himalayas, not as lavender.
Does any Bible translation mention lavender?
Only a paraphrase does. The Message, Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible, has “Mint and lavender” in Song of Songs 4:14. The Hebrew of that verse names other aromatics: “nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,” as the English Standard Version translates it. The King James Version, the New International Version and the English Standard Version do not use the word. Spanish Bibles such as the Reina-Valera 1960 and the Nueva Versión Internacional have no lavanda either; where English Bibles have nard or spikenard, they have nardo.
The aromatic plants the Bible does name include hyssop, used to put the Passover blood on the doorposts (Exodus 12:22) and remembered in the prayer “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean” (Psalm 51:7); the myrrh and aloes that Nicodemus brought for Jesus’ burial (John 19:39); and the list in the Song of Songs, where nard grows with saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh and aloes (Song of Songs 4:13–14).
Was spikenard lavender?
No. Nard appears three times in the Song of Songs (1:12; 4:13–14), where the Hebrew word is nerd, and twice in the Gospels. Mark tells of a woman at Bethany who came to Jesus “with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head” (Mark 14:3). John names her as Mary, the sister of Lazarus, and says she anointed Jesus’ feet with “a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard” (John 12:3). When some objected to the waste, Jesus answered, “She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial” (Mark 14:8). The King James Version reads “spikenard” in both Gospels, following the Latin Vulgate’s nardi spicati in Mark.
Nard came from far away. The Hebrew lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs describes nerd as “an odorific plant from India (via Persia)” and traces the word to the Sanskrit naladâ. Easton’s Bible Dictionary, Smith’s Bible Dictionary and the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia all identify the plant as Nardostachys jatamansi, which grows high in the Himalayas; Easton notes that the Arabs call it sunbul hindi, “the Indian spike.” Nard belongs to the honeysuckle family. Lavender belongs to the mint family.
The Gospels stress the cost. Judas asks why the ointment was not “sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor” (John 12:5), and a denarius was a laborer’s pay for a day (Matthew 20:2). Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer of the first century, gives the price of spikenard as one hundred denarii a pound. Mark and John both call the nard pistikē, a word whose meaning is disputed: Easton’s and Thayer’s Greek lexicon take it to mean genuine or unadulterated, while others suggest “liquid” or a place name. Pliny lists several ways nard was adulterated, among them a cheaper plant he calls pseudo-nard, “false nard.”
Where does the idea that nard was lavender come from?
The claim is at least as old as Victorian herbals. Maud Grieve’s A Modern Herbal (1931) quotes Dr. W. T. Fernie’s Herbal Simples (1895): “By the Greeks the name Nardus is given to Lavender, from Naarda, a city of Syria near the Euphrates, and many persons call the plant ‘Nard.’ St. Mark mentions this as Spikenard, a thing of great value.” Grieve adds that the seventeenth-century herbalist John Parkinson wrote that one kind of lavender “is called by some, Nardus Italica,” and that “some believe that this is the Spikenard mentioned in the Bible.”
The argument mixes up two things. The word nard may come from the Sanskrit name of the Indian plant, as the lexicons hold, or from the city of Naarda, as some suggest, but either way the nard of the Bible is the imported perfume that the Bible dictionaries identify as Nardostachys. Fernie also gives lavender the price Pliny quotes for Indian spikenard. Some modern scholars do identify Pliny’s “false nard” as a lavender, Lavandula stoechas, which would mean lavender was used to counterfeit nard; the nineteenth-century translators of Pliny noted that the French botanist Fée rejected that identification.
Lavender’s meaning in the Bible
Lavender has no meaning in the Bible, because the Bible does not mention it. The meanings given to it in devotional writing, such as peace from its calming scent or royalty from its purple color, are modern associations and not biblical teaching.
Does lavender grow in the Holy Land?
Yes. Spanish lavender, Lavandula stoechas, grows wild on Israel’s coastal plain, and two desert species, Lavandula coronopifolia and Lavandula pubescens, grow in the Negev, the Arava and the Jordan Valley. Modern Hebrew calls lavender ezovyon.
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